Posted
by
Hemoson Monday March 05, 2007 @11:29AM
from the making-the-switch dept.

jkwdoc writes "Vexed by Vista's hardware requirements and product activation issues, many have claimed on various boards that they plan to 'switch to Linux.' [H] Consumer spent 30 days using nothing but Ubuntu Linux to find out if this is truly a viable alternative for the consumer. Linux has indeed become much more than the 'Programmer's OS.'"

Why spend an hour or two attempting to get WoW set up under linux when

Yeah, I mean, who ever spends a whole hour or two on WoW? It's not like an hour or two setting it up would merely be a drop in the bucket compared to the RL-ignoring relationship-destroying thousands of hours you'll spend in WoW...

Over and over again this is thrown in our face. Which is the better solution, get all the build essentials in one package burned to disk, or sit there apt-getting the 5000 little pieces to build them all?

Do you have any idea what a pain it is to deal with a package that comes in source form only and depends on three obscure libraries available only in source form on a flaky server in Nowhereistan? And compiling the three source libraries requires six packages to apt-get, except this one has critical security flaws and that one refuses to install unless it removes GTK and this one insists that it is there already, but the softlink is pointing to version 4.0 and you need 5.2? And you only discover this when you look at it in dired mode in Emacs (which you also had to apt-get), after blundering around in a console for hours? And if you ask "why is package foo failing to compile with error blah" in the Ubuntu forum, everybody goes, "I never heard of that package - is it in the Gnome menu?"

Have you ever programmed a goddamn thing in your entire life? Ubuntu excells at being a Windows replacement for Aunt Tillie. It sucks vulture carcass through a black hole at programming. Deal with it already!

A fair point but my cat can push my PC off the desk, cover it in firewood, pour on petrol and set it alight destroying not just my PC but my house and possibly my neighbours houses into the bargain. I've even caught it dragging a couple of kilos of semtex to my off site backup locations with a joyful gleam in it's eye but luckily I was able to distract it with tuna.

For this reason I've now banned my cat from playing with matches. I had a maths teacher once who claimed his cat could do quadratic equations better than anyone in his class which did make me wonder that if he was able to teach his cat so successfully to do maths why he couldn't teach his class to do it so well, I suggested he may have had a more fulfilling career in a circus at which he looked surprised and said he thought that's what he had done.